ThinkFree Office

Rating:
Summary: A Great Alternative to MS Office
Review: Excluding email and Internet browser software, word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software is probably the most needed or used on the average personal computer. Enter ThinkFree Office, a Java-based office suite that takes care of almost any "office software" task the average computer user will need.

ThinkFree Office is comprised of "ThinkFree Write," a 'Word' like word processor, "ThinkFree Calc," an 'Excel' like spreadsheet application, "ThinkFree Show," which is very similar to 'PowerPoint,' and "ThinkFree Folders," a handy file manager application.

In my experience ThinkFree Office has been a powerful, easy to learn package that incorporates a well designed user interface and a majority of the most important features of MS Office. The toolbars and functional layout in ThinkFree Office are highly inspired by the Microsoft Office suite, and you'll feel nearly at home if you've used Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. ThinkFree Office can open and save the most common Word, Excel, and PowerPoint file formats, and it also makes a great HTML editor, clean and free of the Microsoft "gunk" tags that accompany a "Word" file saved as HTML.

The help files in ThinkFree Office are clear and easy to follow for the most part, but could be improved with more detail. The interface is easy to manage and there are pop-up descriptors for each item in the program's visible anatomy, and the icons are similar to other application's "standard" icons, so it's easy to determine what each toolbar item or button will do.

For all of its features and ease of use, ThinkFree Office is a bargain at [the price]. The fact that ThinkFree Office is written in Java, in my opinion, offers more advantages than disadvantages to the end user. For example, ThinkFree Office is available for nearly every significant computer platform, so it's a simple matter to work on or exchange files between Macintosh, Linux, Windows, etc. A particular feature that makes ThinkFree Office stand out is something called a "CyberDrive," which is a secure online file storage space that makes it easy to mirror files written to a local drive, or to create secure online backups. When you purchase ThinkFree Office you are given 20 MB of "CyberDrive" space free, for 1 year, and up to a gigabyte of space can be purchased, at an additional cost. This is a good idea, and is as easy to use as saving any file on a local drive. I expect this idea will catch on with other software publishers, and it will become a popular feature. As someone who works both at home and at an office I have found the CyberDrive to be really useful.

I am very satisfied with my purchase of ThinkFree Office. I feel as though I've been given a lot of value for the money, and I feel better supporting a worthy smaller company than the MS juggernaut for my "office" needs. If you've been waiting for a powerful cross-platform MS Office alternative, I would suggest giving ThinkFree Office seriouis consideration.

Rating:
Summary: What a piece of pure c__p ! Unbelieveable !! Garbage
Review: I bought Mac version [my platform os9.2, 640Mb on iBook]

It doesn't work, Period. Can't open anything.
Tech support doesn't exist. You get one acknowledgement
advising all the usual stuff that you've already tried, then
no more responses.

Try icWord -- trial ver -- that works.

AND, Amazon edited my review of it.
What bums !

Rating:
Summary: Excellent product
Review: I just downloaded and installed the trial version. First it hanged on installation but after killing the process and installing again succedded. I do not mind that. But the main thing is the software is excellent, all useful features of word and excel are there. Price is comfortably cheap (Below $50). Cyber drive is a wonderful idea.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent product
Review: In search of a Microsoft alternative... purchased ThinkFree office. Loaded it and tried to run it. It locked up my PC requiring the use of taskmaster to free it up. I am running XP on a new Dell Dimension with 1 gig of ram - all other programs run flawlessly. Disapointing

Rating:
Summary: Failed out of the box
Review: In search of a Microsoft alternative... purchased ThinkFree office. Loaded it and tried to run it. It locked up my PC requiring the use of taskmaster to free it up. I am running XP on a new Dell Dimension with 1 gig of ram - all other programs run flawlessly. Disapointing